WOF – World Ornamental Forum

2017

INVERSE STRIKE! – A Call to Continue to Work

WOF is an open work, a spatial essay subject to methodological and thematic changes. The functions of current artistic research, pressing scientific questions, as well as new methodologies are inverted: rather than institutional, they become political. As a work-oriented space WOF is neither a networking platform nor a publication tool; rather it is an incubator for radical artistic and scientific spatio-discursive practices. It offers a structured site for discursive and material reflections of open work. An integrated event, it shows the reviving power of ‘the museum of the future’ as a profoundly critical place of research.

The current exploitation of critical and creative intellectual work has proven to be nothing more than the expansion of the historical exploitation of the proletariat. Beyond that, however, the increasing redundancy of meaningful work within cultural, educational and research institutions of neoliberal management, signals a paradigm shift.

The dominating institutional preoccupation with certificates, visitor numbers, compulsion of publication, employability, questionnaires, and quality control for cultural institutions, regenerates but itself and degrades the institution to an aestheticized form of neoliberal politics. In times of the obtrusion of totalitarian tools in public spheres, the critical question of not showing such aesthetic of non-aesthetic is highly relevant. Whoever refuses to stop producing intrinsic meaningful work generates an act of political resistance: Inverse Strike!

WOF makes a global call to continue producing intrinsic meaningful work, from 26 to 29 April 2017 at the Kirchner Museum in Davos; to show the urgency of your work, discuss it, and continue working.

Please send a three-minute video by 1 March 2017 that shows what you are working on. Not the question as such, but the fact that there is an intrinsic question, perhaps yet unknown, that gives a sense to your work is critical.

There are no registration fees, however, a binding commitment after acceptance is mandatory because your presence during the entire event is indispensible for a fruitful collaboration.

A new setting dictates a new modus in which to work: there is no material to quote from on hand. The modus is prompted by … (Sergei Eisenstein, 1988)

How do we engage with future materials as a haptic and abstract engagement with the luxuries of redrafting social zones? What tools, knowledges, micro universes, and referential points do we invent, leading to a ceremonial aspect of fabricating the social? What social and non/institutional imaginaries are stitched together and piled up, when the function of things (composites) is no longer given, determined, fixed?

Isn’t what we call a ‘rhizome’ here rather a sequence of infinitesimally small ‘old oak trees’?

What if Foucault, Deleuze and Co. had – rather than proposing a radically different approach to reality – only changed scale from ‘singular’ and ‘final’ macro-satisfaction to ‘multiple’ and ‘continuous’ micro-satisfactions, not making the slightest change to satisfaction as such?

What if we asked: What is ‘indifference’ as opposed to ‘identity’? And then, what does it require from us to make A and B not differ? And what’s the role of satisfaction in this work of equality through indifference rather than through identity?

In the cycle of life, life does not happen on the line from father to seed to son, from old oak tree to seed to young oak tree, but rather on the surface inscribed within these lines, a surface not directly accessible by those on the line, however, a surface inseparable from the line and those on it.

This surface emerges as an inevitable result of any free making and construction, however, it can not be constructed as such. This surface of non-construction is just there, has always been there. Our only possible relation to it is to make it not differ from our lives and thus make it matter.

There is always both satisfaction and appreciation, simultaneously, and there is no difference between an old oak tree and a rhizome: the difference is in the air when we smell mushrooms after rain.